#10: Big Brother 11
"Hi everyone, I'm Jeff and you're all AWESOME!"
I think many will be disappointed with seeing Season 11 this low on the ranking, but in all honesty I wasn't too gripped by BB11 to place it very high in the first place. The initial twist of having "cliques" in the house was pretty bad, as it changed things up a lot in terms of strategy, and instead of forcing people to couple-up with random players (ala BB9), it forced them to be in groups of THREE with random players. However, unlike BB9, the groups didn't collectively win HOH, but instead if 1 person from the clique won it, they could not put up another person from their own clique. This both meant that multiple people would be safe from eviction pre-jury each week, and that certain people couldn't target certain players because of this twist. I disliked this twist tremendously for those reasons, as it very much changed how the game could function in the first few weeks, and as well was basically a reiteration of the BB9 twist.
But alongside that terrible twist came another: a returning houseguest would be eligible to enter the house depending on which clique won the first competition. This was a first for BB, as never before had a previous houseguest been allowed to enter the game playing with newbies. Because of this, I was hoping that the first comp would be something related to testing BB seasons past trivia, something relatively fair, something everyone going into the house should know, or at least something mixing mental/physical together, and yet instead production decided to have the first challenge be completely physical, where the houseguests had to hang by a wedige while holding a toilet seat, and whichever clique lasted the longest would have their respective returnee join them, making them a clique of 4. A huge advantage. Of course, because it was a physical challenge, the athlete clique won, giving them Jessie, literally one of the biggest tools (if not the biggest) in BB history. Jessie is a character that I actually don't mind all that much. He was shafted in both his seasons by a twist, which sucks for him, but ultimately I don't dislike the guy. He's just full of himself. I probably wouldn't want to hang with him for an extensive period of time though.
But as I was saying, he was brought into the game as the first HOH, wielding all the power. He subsequently formed an alliance that eventually turned into the bad guys of the season, and midway into the game he was ousted due to the most unfair twist in BB history, the Coup d'etat (the coup de-what?). The Coup d'etat is by far and away my least favorite twist of any BB season ever thus far, especially when it was implemented into BB11. Everyone knows why it's bad, and though I'm sure many were happy to see it used on Jessie, it was ultimately bad enough to bring BB11 down a few notches on my enjoyment scale.